Henry Vizetelly
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Henry Vizetelly (30 July 1820 - 1 January 1894), English publisher, was born in London, the son of a printer. He was early apprenticed as a wood engraver, and one of his first blocks was a portrait of Old Parr.
Encouraged by the success of the Illustrated London News, Vizetelly in 1843; with his brother James Thomas Vizetelly (1817-1897) and Andrew Spottiswoode (1787-1866), started the Pictorial Times, which was published successfully for several years. In 1855, in partnership with Boyne, he started a three-penny paper called the Illustrated Times, which four years later was merged in the Penny Illustrated Paper.
In 1865 Vizetelly became Paris correspondent for the Illustrated London News. During the years he remained in Paris he published several books: Paris in Peril (1882), The Story of the Diamond Necklace (1867) and a free translation of Marius Topin's L'homme au masque de fer (1870) under the title The Man in the Iron Mask.
In 1872 he was transferred to Berlin, where he wrote Berlin under the New Empire (1879). In 1887 he established a publishing house in London, issuing numerous translations of French and Russian authors. In 1888 he was prosecuted for obscene libel for his translation of Zola's La Terre (The Earth), and was fined £100; and when he reissued Zola's works in 1889 he was again prosecuted, fined £200, and imprisoned for three months.
In 1893 he wrote a volume of autobiographical reminiscence called Glances Back through Seventy Years, a graphic picture of literary Bohemia in Paris and London between 1840 and 1870. He died on 1 January 1894 at "Heatherlands", Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey.
His younger brother, Frank Vizetelly (1830-1883), was a clever artist and journalist; he went to Egypt as war correspondent for the Illustrated London News and was never heard of after the massacre of Hicks Pasha's army in Kordofan. His son, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, reworked some of his father's Zola translations and published these bowdlerized versions in the 1890s.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- according the [French Wikipedia] article on The man in the Iron Mask, Marius Topin's book proposed the identity of the man as Comte Ercole Mattioli (or Antoine-Hercule Matthioli), formerly a minister of the Mantuan Government of Charles IV di Gonzago.
